What We Caught at Supercomputing 2014

Lots of BitTorrent users kicked off the wireless network for illegal file sharing. In previous years torrent users have been mostly ignored since there were no good ways to determine which uses of the torrent software were legitimate and which were not. This year, however, these were not hard to find at all. MetaFlows software automatically decodes the torrent and magnet information to determine exactly which files a user is trying to download as well as which files they are seeding to other users. At first we were very picky about only disabling heavy abusers seeding outbound shares of recent movies and current TV shows. As the conference went on we got a bit more aggressive at reporting on and banning downloaders as well. When the user was not on the wireless, they were sometimes a little hard to pin down:

“…it was from someone who gave a talk for them and plugged into their network. This person will not be presenting again, so they expect we will not see this activity again. Please let them know if we do.

Spyware on the show floor.We saw the return of some MarketScore spyware that we had seen at the Denver conference in 2013. Unfortunately we could not always track down adware/spyware cases on the show floor or the wireless since they were a lower priority.

Inbound telnet scanning and the default IPMI portA couple of cases of telnet port 23 being accessible by the outside world were discovered before they could be exploited. One of them appeared to be an IPMI port that someone had accidentally plugged in; it was still configured to the default admin/admin password.

“We chatted with the two booths that have these machines. The one with the admin/admin account has disconnected that interface. The second booth has disabled telnet. Both booths were very happy that we let them know. Thanks!”

Linux Trojans – default/weak passwords led to boxes being added to a DDoS botnet.

Unfortunately the first of these that we reported was left unresolved and its status as a bot was confirmed when it began sending SYN flood attacks overnight. The host did get attended to the next day, and future cases of this infection were taken much more seriously. Once we got the behavior pattern down we found that the infected host downloads a binary payload from a command and control server.

After adding the binary source to the blackhole list these infections stopped. Generally the cases that remained were resolved by talking to the user and letting them take care of it:

“The technical guy said that that IP was just a VM and he will shut it down. We are no longer seeing traffic.”

“I chatted with the guy in booth WXYZ and he is in the process of cleaning up his Linux box. He was thankful for the information, and commented that he had the default username and password for root on the Linux box.”

Suspicious signs of WireLurker on OS X systems. We want to research these a bit more, it looked like there were maybe three OS X machines on the network that were triggering alerts to this “evil” domain.

Large scale SIP Scanning. There was a massive DDoS style scan of the network on port 5060 on the second day of the conference, and we suspect it may have contributed to some infrastructure issues and recommended temporarily blocking off that inbound port at the border if there were no known legitimate services running for it. Hundreds of external scanners to thousands of internal hosts? This one stood out to us right away.